Eye on the Fort Fisher Hermit

By Ben SteelmanBen.Steelman@StarNewsOnLine.com

Saturday

Aug 15, 2009 at 6:30 PM

Photographer chronicles life of intriguing, legendary character

For a while in the 1960s, he claimed to draw more tourists than any other attraction in Southeastern North Carolina, other than the Battleship North Carolina – and he just might have been right.Thousands of locals and visitors made their way through the marshes at Fort Fisher, to a trash-laden yard next to a World War II-vintage concrete bunker, to sit in on a session of his “School of Common Sense.” His epitaph reads, “He made people think.”Robert E. Harrill (1893-1972), better known as “The Fort Fisher Hermit,” has been gone for 36 years, but a touch of his spirit still hovers over the Cape Fear coast, and his admirers remain numerous. Now an old friend, Fred Pickler, has published a memoir in photos: “Life and Times of the Fort Fisher Hermit.”“He was a visionary,” said Pickler. “He foresaw the whole aquarium down there, before it was even a concept. He was always down there in the marsh, looking and listening. He knew the life down there – he didn’t know the scientific names for things, but he knew about them – and he wrote things down in his notebooks, just spiral composition books, about what he saw.”A native of the North Carolina Sandhills, Pickler first encountered the Hermit as a Boy Scout, when his troop traveled down to Fort Fisher for a camping trip around 1956. “That was before he actually became known as the Hermit,” he’d said. “He’d just started to grow his beard.” At the time, the Hermit was camped out in a tent near the old Confederate monument at Fort Fisher. He’d talk to the boys about gathering natural food.The previous summer, in 1955, Harrill wrote his sister, “I’m hitching down to Carolina Beach to see how it is down there. Since I haven’t had a chance to get there in the last 28 years, I figure this might be my only chance for the next 28 years.”According to the Hermit’s biographer, Michael F. Edwards, that 1955 trip ended unsuccessfully. Harrill – who sometimes spelled his last name “Harrell” – ran afoul of local police, who ran him in on a vagrancy charge, and had him shipped by Travelers’ Aid back to his longtime hometown, Shelby.By the next summer, however, the Hermit was back – and he remained a fixture on the beach for the next 16 years.“I started going down to see him,” Pickler said. “I loved to hear him talk. He had his spiel that he’d deliver again and again and again. It took awhile, but I finally said, ‘Mr. Harrill, I heard that before. Tell me about yourself.’ ”It was years before Pickler learned about the Hermit’s background – a story compiled by Edwards in several books and in the documentary “The Fort Fisher Hermit.”Born on Groundhog Day 1893 in Gaffney, S.C., Harrill had a hard life. While he was a child, his mother and two brothers died of typhoid fever. Pickler said Harrill later told him how he was sent to live with a step-grandmother, who screamed at him and beat him, sending him running into the woods for shelter. Decades later, as the Hermit, Harrill would often talk about writing a book, an expose of family life called “A Tyrant in Every Home.”Harrill graduated from Boiling Spring High School – a surviving photo shows him as a member of the school’s literary and debating society – and stayed on at its junior college branch. (In 1942, long after he left, this institution would become Gardner Webb College). At one point, Harrill considered a career as a Baptist minister, but he dropped out before graduating – according to Edwards, because of a dispute with a faculty member over the topic of evolution.From there, Harrill followed a miscellaneous career of mostly low-paying jobs: cotton mill worker, Linotypist, water boy on WPA projects, watch repairer and, for a while, a sidewalk tinkerer in Shelby. “He was a printer for a while, until he contracted lead poisoning,” Pickler said.In 1913, Harrill married Katie Hamrick. The couple had four sons, as well as a daughter who died shortly after birth, but the marriage was apparently rocky. Harrill’s in-laws had him involuntarily committed, at least once, to a mental institution; he sometimes complained of “demons” in his head. In 1935, one son committed suicide by jumping from a railway trestle. That same year, Harrill’s wife left him, taking their children with her to Pennsylvania. They would divorce some years later.Through this, Harrill continued to read and study. He spent time researching in the U.S. Patent Office – “at least that’s what he said,” Pickler said. Later, he began taking correspondence courses from the “School of Bio-Psychology” of Dr. William Marcus Taylor of Chattanooga, Tenn., whose Unitarian philosophy influenced him greatly. Harrill would remain in touch with Taylor’s school until soon before his death.Then, in the summer of 1955, Harrill headed for the coast, seeking a radically simpler, self-reliant lifestyle.“He was a true hunter-gatherer,” Pickler said. “He’d get some of the biggest clams you ever saw in your life. Before pollution ruined the beds, he’d find mussels 2 or 3 inches wide.“He’d comb the bush, get sassafras for tea. He’d dig up tubers, potato-like things – I had no idea what they were. He’d gather cattail roots and roast them; they were actually quite good. If he could’ve somehow passed the health inspection, he could have run a restaurant.” Back then, Harrill wasn’t the only “hermit” on Federal Point. Another character – “a true hermit; he really avoided people,” Pickler said – was Empy Hewitt, sometimes called “the Wild Man” or “the Bird Man.”“He lived out in the woods,” Pickler said. “He had on this old Air Force jacket.” Hewitt, whose face had been scarred by cancer, sometimes lurked in the bush near the old Air Force recreation area, springing out to spook high couples necking in the dunes, Pickler recalled.Somehow, the Hermit and the Bird Man struck up a friendship of sorts. It was Hewitt, according to Pickler, who showed Harrill a few tricks for catching fish in traps and scouring the dunes for edible plants. He also pointed Harrill toward an abandoned concrete blockhouse – sometimes jokingly called “the pillbox” – dating from World War II, when the Army had used Fort Fisher as an anti-aircraft training post.By 1958 – when Harrill headed into the county courthouse in Wilmington to ride out Hurricane Helene – the “Fort Fisher Hermit” was starting to make local headlines. At one point, Harrill had worked with a traveling carnival; some sources claim he was actually a roustabout with the Ringling Bros. circus. Apparently, the experience taught him a little showmanship. When Soviet Communist Party chief Nikita Krushchev toured the United States in 1959, the Hermit wrote him an open letter, inviting him to visit Fort Fisher so he could meet some real Americans.When tourists and out-of-town reporters braved the mosquitoes and found their way to the bunker, Harrill would greet them in a straw hat, a pair of swim trunks and little else. In a garbage-strewn yard, usually shared with one or more stray dogs, Harrrill would share his philosophy and invite visitors to sign his guest book. By the 1970s, he was claiming up to 17,000 thousand visitors per year, from every U.S. state and dozens of foreign countries.Special Forces personnel and other soldiers on “escape and evasion” training, would occasionally contact the Hermit for foraging lessons, Pickler said. The Hermit would gladly trade their C-ration cans for some fresh-caught seafood.Pickler – who was back in town in the mid-1960s, working as a Star-News photographer after serving a couple of hitches in the Army – kept in touch, and kept snapping pictures.“Some people claim he was a drunk,” Pickler said. “They didn’t know him. The man was a teetotaler. He didn’t drink. I’ve seen him fake a drink – he’d stick his tongue in the bottle lid and pretend to take a swig, just to be sociable.“People said he was crazy – crazy like a fox, maybe.”The garbage Pickler blamed on teenagers and locals who dumped junk at his camp and never picked it up. Meanwhile, publicity brought unwanted attention.“People would go down there just to fool with the Hermit,” Pickler said. “He was a defenseless old man.”In 1961, Harrill claimed he was “kidnapped” by two men but managed to escape. When he went into Carolina Beach for supplies, delinquents would sometimes set fires at the bunker, destroying some of his possessions.Rumors began to spread that the Hermit had a fortune buried somewhere near his camp; according to Pickler, the old man only collected some spare change. His estate amounted only to a few hundred dollars.By the 1970s, “age and the elements were starting to catch up with him,” Pickler said. “He had good weeks and bad weeks. He’d proably have lived to 80 if they hadn’t messed with him.”On June 4, 1972, five local boys discovered the hermit lying dead in the door of his bunker.Pickler, who was a crime-scene technician with the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Department at the time, thought he saw signs of a struggle: a surplus of footprints, drag marks, even an abandoned shoe stuck in the mud. He says he urged an autopsy, which was not performed at the time. In 1984, Harrill’s son authorized an exhumation and autopsy, but results then were deemed inconclusive.In 1989, the Hermit’s remains were reburied at Federal Point Cemetery in Carolina Beach.Pickler, meanwhile, is still in Wilmington after a colorful career: freelance photographer, sheriff’s deputy, sales representative for Smith & Wesson and for firms dealing in equipment for police and anti-terrorist units.“He’s quite a character,” said Rob Hill, a filmmaker who worked with Pickler on a documentary about the Hermit. “You sit down with Fred, and you’re constantly entertained.” Along the way, he was involved in the motion picture “Blue Velvet,” in which he appears as “the Yellow Man.”“I’ve had friends say I’ve done everything but drive a pink bulldozer,” he said, grinning.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.